"The monograph clearly demonstrates how speech etiquette in online communication adapts to the technological conditions of virtual communication. The ways and forms of supporting verbal interaction depend on the socio-cultural and ethno-specific communicative experience of the group members, their cultural memory. Digital media, just like writing and printing, has caused another cultural revolution.
They form new relationships in social reality: the analysis proves that a new culture of transition of mass communication to interpersonal communication and vice versa has been formed in online communication. The study, carried out in several Slavic languages, showed that linguistic diversity is a huge wealth of the modern world - and this is one of the strongest impressions from the book."
-Stanisław Gajda, Opole University, Poland
This edited book focuses on speech etiquette, examining the rules that govern communication in various online communities: professional, female, and ethnospecific. The contributors analyze online communication in the Slavic languages Russian, Slovak, Polish, and Belarusian, showing how the concept of speech etiquette differs from the concept of politeness, although both reflect the relationship between people in interaction. Online communities are united on the basis of common informative or phatic illocutions among their participants, and their speech etiquette is manifested in stable forms of conducting discussions - stimulating and responding. Each group has its own ideas of unacceptable speech behavior and approaches to sanitation, and the rules of speech etiquette in each group determine the degree of rapport and distancing between the participants in discourse. The chapters in this book explore how rapport and distance are established through acts such as showing attention to the addressee and increasing his or her communicative status; reducing or increasing the illocutionary power of evaluations and motivations; and evaluating one's own or someone else's speech. The volume will be of interest to researchers studying online communication in such diverse fields as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, programming, and media studies.